PRIME Minister Scott Morrison and angry trade unions have simultaneously moved to expose Anthony Albanese’s climate double-talk, as a senior MP threatens to quit the green-obsessed ALP.
While “climate emergency” MPs pretended Saturday’s by-election thumping had nothing to do with climate politics, their union paymasters are saying otherwise – and PM Morrison is capitalising on the turmoil.
- Crazy green MPs in denial over by-election climate thumping.
- Three federal ALP seats now in doubt for climate-obsessed Labor.
- Morrison swoops to attract Labor's forgotten true believers.
More than three-quarters of primary votes cast in the Upper Hunter on Saturday were for non-green candidates. While Malcolm Turnbull’s “close down coal” hopeful, ex-journalist Kirsty O’Connell, managed just eight per cent.
INNER-CITY
CFMEU leader Peter Jordon warned after the ballot that Labor Leader Anthony Albanese must stop developing policy in “inner-city coffee shops”.
In an The Australian newspaper report, Mr Jordon said he believed at least three Labor-held federal seats were now under serious threat – Shortland, Patterson and Hunter.
“It’s absolutely disgraceful Labor opposed a $600m gas plant in the region,” Mr Jordon said. “Labor needs to stop developing its policies in inner-city coffee shops.
“Albo is falling further behind in coal country and I think that was a reflection here in the Upper Hunter on Saturday,” Mr Jordan said.
“If he thinks he is rebuilding it with blue-collar workers then I don’t know where they are.
“It is a terrible result but it, I think, stares the federal Labor Party right in the face that they have got a huge job ahead of them.
“We had a good candidate, who stood and developed some great policy and plans for blue-collar workers in particular coalminers here in the Upper Hunter.
“But the problem was blue-collar miners still didn’t listen to it. They went and still voted for One Nation. And One Nation are going to deliver them what? Bloody nothing. But they still went there.”
Mr Albanese, however, played down the impact of climate politics in the by-election result.
SWINGS
“Labor represents the interests of blue-collar workers. It is only Labor that’s been standing up for jobs,” he said.
Since 2019, the Upper Hunter’s biggest polling booths – located in Singleton – have recorded swings against Labor ranging from 11 to 17 per cent.
The Party managed just 20.8 per cent of first preference votes on Saturday.
Labor’s lone voice for climate reason Joel Fitzgibbon – who represents the neighbouring Federal seat of Hunter – said he’d walk away from Parliament if Mr Albanese refused to back blue collar workers.
“Our brand is in trouble,” Mr Fitzgibbon said. “If we don’t heed the warning, we’ll go the way of the Kodak brand.
“We are facing something that looks a little bit like an existential threat here,” he said.
“On the weekend we had a primary vote with barely a two in the front of it and it is a real wake-up call for Labor.”
Mr Morrison, meanwhile, is targeting the ALP’s forgotten true believers.
The Prime Minister said the values of working-class voters were more in line with the Coalition than with Labor.
He told The Australian that lower- and middle-income voters wanted to be empowered to take charge of their own lives.
“They don’t see themselves as being held back as some sort of victims of the system.”
Mr Morrison believes voters from the Hunter Valley as well as Sydney’s west were rapidly becoming aware of Labor’s misplaced loyalty to the inner-city.PC
Labor’s problem is simple – they try to herd their rusted on voters to a woke and green nirvana but their voters exercising common sense refuse to go there.
One thing obvious is the decline in votes for both major parties. I sense that the Liberals also have that problem. Small wonder as they too seem to be developing their policies in the inner cities.
As the solar cycle runs into cooler weather, we are going to need reliable electricity, not fantasies. Liddell is nominally 2,000 MWh capacity but has been running at half that continuously, yet our politicians don’t seem able to see that a 660MWh intermittent gas plant isn’t a replacement. The result will be blackouts and considerable unpopularity for the party in power.
Perhaps that is Labor’s secret? Avoid office until the Libs stuff up (as they will).
It’s astonishing, is it not, that Labor seems unable to connect its voter dissonance with its climate, energy and woke policy agenda. And if front bench candidates such as Plibersek, Burke, Marles, Kenneally and Wong remain their answer, long may their selective blindness continue.